How can you align your brand journalism content with your organization's values?

1 Know your values

Before you start crafting your brand journalism content, you need to have a clear understanding of your organization's values and how they guide your actions, decisions, and communications. Your values should be consistent, transparent, and meaningful to your internal and external stakeholders. They should also reflect your organization's purpose, vision, and culture. To know your values, you can conduct a values audit, review your mission statement, and solicit feedback from your employees, customers, partners, and other relevant groups.

3 Use your values as a filter

Your values can also help you filter out stories that are not aligned with your organization's values or that may contradict, undermine, or dilute them. You should avoid stories that are irrelevant, inaccurate, biased, or misleading to your audience or that may damage your reputation, credibility, or trustworthiness. You should also avoid stories that are overly promotional, salesy, or self-congratulatory and that do not provide value or insight to your audience. Instead, you should focus on stories that are informative, educational, inspirational, or entertaining and that showcase your organization's value proposition and differentiation.

4 Engage your audience with your values

Your brand journalism content should not only communicate your values, but also invite your audience to engage with them. You can do this by creating interactive, immersive, and shareable content formats that encourage your audience to participate, respond, or take action. You can also use storytelling techniques such as narratives, characters, emotions, and conflicts to make your content more compelling and memorable. Additionally, you can use social media, blogs, podcasts, newsletters, or other channels to distribute your content and foster dialogue, feedback, or collaboration with your audience.

5 Measure your values impact

Finally, you should measure the impact of your brand journalism content on your organization's values and goals. You can use qualitative and quantitative methods to assess how your content is influencing your audience's awareness, perception, engagement, loyalty, or advocacy of your organization and its values. You can also use metrics such as reach, impressions, views, clicks, shares, comments, or conversions to evaluate the performance of your content and identify areas for improvement. By measuring your values impact, you can demonstrate the value of your brand journalism content and optimize your strategy accordingly.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?